Plurilingual foreign-language teaching in early EFL: exploring student perspectives and profiles

ABSTRACT

In a mixed-methods approach, this paper explores student views of plurilingual foreign-language (FL) teaching of English among primary-school students in grade 4. We investigate whether students who were raised in the majority language only and those who grew up speaking an additional minority language differ in their appreciation of plurilingual FL teaching and whether plurilingual FL teaching appeals to students with different profiles in linguistic, cognitive, attitudinal, or individual background factors. One-hundred and thirty-two students took part in a six-month teaching intervention, in which 20% of FL lesson time was devoted to plurilingual teaching. A qualitative analysis of student interviews shows mixed views of plurilingual FL teaching, with students speaking additional minority languages evaluating plurilingual teaching more favourably than majority-language-only students. In a quantitative analysis, we compare the groups of students who appreciated and those who did not appreciate plurilingual FL teaching in terms of their linguistic, cognitive or individual background factors. Students who appreciate plurilingual FL teaching display significantly more positive attitudes to the FL and a greater sense of academic achievement. Moreover, students appreciative of plurilingual FL teaching demonstrate significantly higher learning gains in productive vocabulary than non-appreciative students. In all, these findings indicate that attitudinal factors modulate the appreciation and the learning outcomes in plurilingual FL teaching.

KEYWORDS:

• Plurilingual FL teaching
• multilingualism
• student views
• attitudes
• learner profiles

Acknowledgements

We thank Sarah McMonagle and two anonymous reviewers as well as the Editors for helpful comments on an earlier version of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We refer to these languages as minority languages in the following to differentiate them from the societal majority language. Note that this use of the term minority language does not entail any claims as to whether these languages are minority languages in other contexts (e.g. Kurdish) or not (e.g. Russian).

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF) as part of the research initiative ‘Sprachliche Bildung und Mehrsprachigkeit' (FKZ 01JM1702A/B, 2017–2020).